She was collected at the airfield by Warren Stone, the London-based PRO. Stone was tall, blond, with too many white teeth and he spoke to her in the kind of soothing tones she imagined a vet might use with a temperamental mare. He even put a hand on her arm, the same way one approached a horse’s rump, gingerly.

“I know that a mistake was made,” he said.

“Exactly,” Jess said, relieved that somebody understood she hadn’t purposely gone out looking to photograph a fight. “I was told I’d find a hospital there, which is what I was supposed to be writing about, not a battle.”

“I can get you a more suitable assignment,” Warren said, smiling at her. “We like the women to focus on women’s interest, for the women’s pages. Like this.” He passed her a newspaper folded to a piece written by Inez Robb in North Africa. The headline read “War Fails to Spoil Midwinter Cruise on the Mediterranean” and was accompanied by a cartoon drawing of Robb standing before a mirror applying lipstick. “I have no idea why you were sent to Italy. Like I said, now that I’m looking after you, it won’t happen again.”

“I asked to go to Italy,” Jess said quietly, while her mind processed both what he’d said and the way he’d said it, as if he were her protector, ready to guide her, with his sharp white teeth, toward the things seemly for a woman, rather than the unladylike.

“But now that you’ve seen Italy, you’ll know you made a mistake.”

He let the sentence hang in the air, giving her the out she’d thought she wanted. But to tell him, with all his condescension, that yes, she couldn’t face Italy and would rather report on cruises was something she found herself unable to do. Instead she said, testing, still unsure if she was reading the situation correctly, “I wouldn’t have been sent back to England if I was a man who’d been driven to a battlefield, would I? So it’s not just that I took photographs that were beyond the scope of my orders to report on the hospital, is it?”

“Women are not permitted in combat zones. But I can get you plenty of other assignments.” Again that touch on the arm, that smile—which suggested he was used to having some kind of potent effect when he flashed his teeth around—and Jess realized that, as well as wanting to relegate her to the kind of reporting she could just as easily do for Vogue back in America, he was flirting. And doing it with such assurance, as if he really thought she’d bat her eyelashes at him, be grateful that he’d rescued her and be only too happy to let him take her womanliness out to dinner—so long as the restaurant wasn’t on the same land area as the war that was forbidden to her by that same femaleness.

“I should limit myself to cruises and cosmetics?” she asked coolly, dumping the newspaper on the floor of the jeep.